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Using <v:rss> With Google Product Search
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July 08, 2009

As you may know, <v:rss> makes it easy to quickly create an RSS feed from any Collection in your site. Vae also takes this a step further by making it easy to create an RSS feed that can be submitted to Google Product Search, so potential customers can locate your items when querying this search engine. In this mini tutorial, we'll create an RSS feed that's ready to submit to Google Product Search.

Here's our example Collection that we're going to be working with; it's called "Records":

<v:rss> works with any Collection, so you can quickly create RSS feeds from your existing Collections.

Next, we'll need to write the code inside our rss.xml file. Normally it takes just one line of VaeML code to create an RSS feed; since we're submitting this feed to Google Product Search, we'll have to add some Google Base tags. Here's the contents of our rss.xml file:

And we're all done! When we load up the RSS file in our browser, we can see the contents of the Collection is now accessible via RSS:

If our customers wanted to easily stay up-to-date on what records we have for sale, they could subscribe to this RSS feed using any browser or RSS client. Since we can use <v:rss> to output the contents of any Collection, we could just as easily create an RSS file for our blog or any other Collection our customers might want to subscribe to.

Since we integrated the Google Base Tags into our RSS feed, it's ready to be submitted to Google Product Search [just follow Google's instructions]. After we submit it, our records will appear in Google Product Search results, and we'll have increased traffic to our website without much effort.